On days like this
by Apumintan
Summary: It was days like this when he remembered. When the sun shined high and you could feel the coming summer in the wind. When the children were at school and the silence conquered the house. When the only sound he could hear was his own panting from the work out in the dojo. Yes, on days like this the day from 20 years ago played in his memories like it had happened only recently.
1. On days like this

It was days like this when he remembered. When the sun shined high and you could feel the coming summer in the wind. When the children were at school and the silence conquered the house. When the only sound he could hear was his own panting from the work out in the dojo. Yes, at days like this the day from 20 years ago played in his memories like it had happened only recently. He remembered her little arms around his neck. Her fragile smile saying the words he did not want to hear. Her laugh that was so improper for the situation. Every detail of her packed suitcase.

"Fine! If you want this way, then go! See if I care!" he stormed out of her room, banging her door shut behind him. Three steps away from her room he took his rage out on the wall, punching a big hole through it. From the corner of his eye he saw their families standing in front of the staircase, too scared to come to the second floor. He could see their worried faces, their tears ready to burst. It made him even madder – he was the one who wanted to cry! He pulled his hand out of the hole and turned again towards the door. Without knocking he walked into the room. She had finished packing all her documents she felt important to bring with her.

"I'm sorry, Akane. I didn't mean it like that – I don't.. want you to go. So can you stop packing?" He stood in the middle of the room like misplaced piece of furniture.  
She laughed as she glanced at him: "I know you don't want me to go. But this is not your choice to make."  
"Please, Akane, don't do this," he had said with a voice almost breaking, "just tell me what's wrong and I'll fix it."  
"Nothing's wrong, Ranma. There's nothing for you to fix," she said while taking another dress out from the closet. He recognised the dress she had worn on their first date after the failed wedding. She looked at the dress with small smile playing on her lips and put the dress back at the closet to take out the dress Ranma had never seen her wear.

"If nothing's wrong, then why are you doing this?" Ranma asked, getting more desperate with each clothing item travelling to the suitcase.  
"I told you – I just have to," she said without looking at him.  
"That's not enough of a reason!" he said while grabbing her shoulders to make her look at him, "tell me!"  
She looked him into the eyes – her eyes were pure, confident and peaceful while his were stormy, angry and sad at the same time.  
"Ranma," she said and touched his cheek with her fingertips. He no longer cared about his pride. He wrapped his arms around her into a tight hug.  
"'Kane, I… you do know, right? All the others – I don't care about them. I never have. You do know it, don't you?"  
She slightly pushed him away just enough to put her arms around his neck.  
Only a small whisper came out of her smile formed lips as she said: "I know you love me, Ranma." She could see tears forming in his eyes as he stayed quiet. "And I love you too."

He tore his gaze from her face as he said: "I find it hard to believe right now."  
"I know you do," she said with a smile as she slid her hands down his torso and straightened his blouse.  
"You know I've always wanted to do this – straighten your blouse while you're wearing it," she said as bigger smile grew on her face. She turned away from him yet he grabbed her hand and pulled her back into his arms.  
But this time he held her head close to his: "Akane, I have never begged anything from you. But I beg you now, don't do it. Don't go."  
His eyes travelled from her eyes to her lips and before he noticed he was leaning in.  
"Don't," she said her gaze fixed on his lips.  
"Why not?" he asked.  
"It won't change my mind."  
"Then does it matter?"  
"It will hurt only more."  
"You're already hurting me enough," he said and closed the gap between their lips. It was sweet and slow. How his lips fitted hers. She obeyed and responded the same. She could feel his feelings through this single kiss – how all he ever wanted to do was to keep her safe; how he wanted to hear all of her troubles; how he would be there until the end of times. He let his front head rest on hers keeping his eyes still closed. She slowly opened her eyes, had he opened his eyes he'd seen a tear forming in the corner of her eye.  
"Saotome Ranma, you are perfect."  
He opened his eyes, a slight hope in his eyes: "No, I am not. I am stupid gender bending perverted jerk."  
She let out a small laugh: "You are, aren't you?"

She slowly pushed him away from herself; she looked at his eyes and studied his face as if she wanted to paint it later. Her fingers brushed his bangs as she smiled a weak smile and said: "I do love you and one day you will understand it. It might not be tomorrow, but one day you will understand."  
"I don't want to understand. I want you. I want us. From now until forever," he said, his words being strong and confident. The day had been emotional enough to make him no longer feel embarrassment of how desperate he sounded.  
"I know," she said as she turned back to her suitcase. He kept silent, no longer having words he hadn't used yet. She looked around the room, her eyes barely pausing on him.  
"I guess it's all," she said with a small frown. She closed the suitcase and picked it up from her bed. Her eyes stop on him, trying to find words to say. Noticing he wasn't looking at her, she followed his gaze. He looked behind her on her nightstand where a picture frame stood. The same he had gotten her during one Christmas. It still contained the picture of their families and friends but on the frame itself were tons of little pictures of only the two of them. She was going to leave it behind, just like she left behind everything else that had any connection to him, just like she was going to leave him. A tear ran down his cheek and he did nothing to hide it.

"Good-bye, Ranma," she said quietly as she left the room. He stood motionless. He heard their families starting to cry, yelling at her, trying their best to keep her from going. He stood motionless as he heard the front door closing, leaving everybody weeping. The room filled with her fragrance, the memories, the hopes – it seemed so empty now. He was never the one to surrender – he still wanted to fight! To turn the events around and make her come back but he didn't find the energy to go after her. There was something in the air that said that this was final. That no matter how far he chased after her, she was not coming back. He dragged himself to her bed and took the picture frame. In the picture he was surrounded by his other fiancées and there were so many crazy people that they had to deal with. But they were happy. They were young and nothing could stop them. There were dreams and hopes.

He felt anger rise in him – it felt so unfair. Who had known that the crazy stormy days were the happiest ones? That the peaceful shiny days are the ones that hurt the most? He wanted to break the picture frame, tear the picture into million little pieces and burn it. Yet he couldn't do it, thinking that if she decided to come back, she'd hate him for that. And that realisation made him break. The world around him disappeared as he released his pain into the world with his desperate weeps.

He waited a year and another one. With each passing day he felt more out of place at the house he had wanted his children to call home. Once the dojo was written on Kasumi's and 's name, he left. He found an abandoned dojo he rebuilt as his own. Yet even in the new house, the memories of her haunted him and anybody else who noticed the similarities to the old Tendo house. No one said it out loud but it felt as if he had built a new home for her to return to. But she never did. Years went by and he found a woman and they had two beautiful sons.  
Yet on days like this he went to the storage room, pulled out a small box and took out an old picture frame. He would open the frame and take out the picture to reread the words he had once found written there: "I will love you until death and beyond."  
"Me too, tomboy, me too." 

* * *

_All rights for the characters and original story belong to Rumiko Takahashi. _  
_Something that came into my mind because of a song called "Walk it off" by Angus and Julia Stone. Also the main point is a little bit influenced by the movie "Horns"_.  
_And yes, I do cry while writing._


	2. His father's eyes

_"The real strength is to continue living with the pain."_

"Dad, i'm home!" he yelled as he got home. He could hear movements in the storage room. On days like this he could always find his father from the storage room. He never knew what his father did there yet somehow it was an unspoken rule to not disturb him.

"Oh, welcome home," his father emerged from the storage room. For all his life he had considered his father a strange man. Not in a negative way, but in the way that there was something unusual about him. The few visitors he had were powerful martial artists that kept saying "you know, your father is the strongest man alive." His father, his teacher most definitely was a strong martial artist. Yet he had never seen him do anything that would entitle him to be the strongest man alive.

"There's a package for you," he said pointing towards a box on the table, "how about a sparring session? I'm stiff from all the sitting at school." "Yeah, go change your clothes," his father said absentmindedly as his eyes were nailed on the package.

The strangest part of his father was the look he sometimes had on his face. He would sit on the porch and look at the blue sky and his eyes would say that he wanted to go away. This look on his father's face was something he was scared of. When he was younger he had thought that father was really going to leave them.  
When he asked his mother about it, she smiled her sad smile and asked:"you love curry, don't you?" He nodded.  
"But there are many curries in the world, right? There's the curry i make, the curry grandma makes, the curry you eat at school. Yet there is one curry that you love the most,right?"  
He nodded:"Mom's curry."

His mother smiled again before continuing: "but one day you will get big and i will get old and then comes a day when you can't eat my curry anymore. So you'll have to find the curry you love the second most."  
She looked at her son and sat down next to him: "You see love is just like curry. And i am the curry your dad loves the second most."  
He felt tears brimming in his eyes - he didn't fully understand what his mother was saying but it made him sad: "Then why doesn't dad eat the curry he loves the most?"  
She hugged her little son: "He would if he could... but he no longer can."

This distant look on his father's face had always kept a small distance between them. When he was younger his father played with him, took him to places, taught him martial arts. They laughed together, they had great times together. Yet as soon as he saw the look on his father's face, he felt like he didn't know this man at all. He knew he wasn't the only one. His younger brother was the same. And the sadness in his grandmother's face when she caught their father having this look... yet he had never seen his father cry. While it should have been natural for the strongest man alive to not to cry, it felt unnatural on his father.

The bigger was his surprise when he came down from his room and found his father crying in the living room. The opened package in front of him seemed to be repackaged over and over again, the most inner layer being so worn out that it seemed to have been on the road for tens of years. In his father's hands, there was a letter that seemed to have been written years and years ago.

"Dad?" he asked hesitatingly while stepping closer. He saw the inside of the package - pictures of a girl barely in her twenties - an age he himself was soon to reach. She smiled a dazzling smile to the camera while sitting on a hospital bed. Yet he couldn't figure out whether it was the light reflecting on the corner of her eye or was it a tear finding its way out.

"You know, son," his father finally said, "you can become the strongest man in the world. Strong enough to kill a god. Yet there is one god, somewhere out there, that you can never kill - and he's the one that's gonna hurt you the most."

Yes, his father most definitely was a strange man. Yet at that moment he truly felt that his father was the strongest man alive.


	3. Her husband's box

It was on days like this when she went there. When her husband was on a training trip with their two sons now both already grown up men with families of their own. When she was all alone in the house he had built for someone else.

Yes, on days like this she went to the storage room, pulled out a small box and took out a picture frame. She would look at the picture and smile. She had seen quite many of the people in the picture dash through their 40years together. Yet there was one person she could never meet and _she_ was the one she wanted to meet the most.

He never talked about the time before she met him as if he hadn't lived then. Yet just one look at the picture and she knew it was then that he was more alive than ever. Truth to be told she had never seen this cocky dazzling smile he wore in the picture. His smiles were always broken, his laugh always hollow. In the little worn out pictures of him and _her_ on the frame, she saw that once his voice had filled the world and his smile lit up the room. She didn't mind that his smile was not meant for her. She wasn't the jealous type of woman. After all she had married him knowing that he was carrying rocky cliffs with him. She had known from the start that she could never be nr 1, but as long as she had her wedding ring around her finger, she didn't mind.

She took out the pictures that had been added to the box around ten years ago. Yet the pictures went back even more years to the past. Taken just some years after the little pictures on the frame. She looked at the picture - how beautiful _she_ was. Even if she could turn back time and lose all her wrinkles, be a maiden again, she couldn't compare herself to the beauty in the picture. This young girl was and always will be more beautiful than she was.

She unfolded the letter which content she had memorised word by word. And still there was so much she didn't understand.  
"It would have been Jusenkyo all over again. Only this time your voice would not, could not bring me back." She could only imagine the meaning behind it. She had heard the name Jusenkyo before along with the stories of a curse her husband used to have. But that could possibly not be the case this time.

After the explanation of how _she_ saw _her_ father go through with it, how _she_ didn't want him to suffer even more, were the words that haunted her every day since the day she first read them:"I will love you until death and beyond."

There were many things she still didn't know about her husband. Yet these words made her understand a part of her husband she had always felt confused about. His habit of sleep-talking wasn't just a mumble of random things. It had always been an answer to _her._  
"Me too, tomboy, me too."

On days like this she wished that death could take him faster. Maybe in next life, _they_ could be together.

* * *

_So it was supposed to be a oneshot. But then I woke up next morning and had the whole second chapter ready in my mind. And by the time I finished jotting down the son's POV, I already knew every single thing the wife was feeling. Hope you understood that every chapter had a 10 year gap. So yeah- I'm sorry for giving you more chapters. _  
_And yes, the whole story is based on the fact that Akane's mother died at a young age. Takahashi never revealed what happened but I always got the feeling that it wasn't just an accident. So what if whatever took her was genetic?_


End file.
